Women, feminism, and geek culture

The linkspam was inside us all along (17 July 2015)

Everything You Know About Boys and Video Games Is Wrong | Time: “Kids I’ve worked with, both male and female, will put up with a lot to play exciting games. But it doesn’t mean they like the way women are portrayed. Yet the video game industry seems to base much of its game and character design on a few assumptions, among them that girls don’t play big action games, boys won’t play games with strong female characters, and male players like the sexual objectification of female characters.”

Tech’s Hottest Lunch Spot? A Strip Club | Forbes: “In a city that’s being gentrified by the engineers and startup employees, the Gold Club is perhaps the most outré illustration of San Francisco’s recent excesses, a place where curious crowds come for the cheap fare and stay for the alcohol and extracurriculars. It is also an example of how tone deaf many in the male-dominated tech industry can be.”

How Reddit shoved former CEO Ellen Pao off the glass cliff | The Daily Dot: “What is clear, however, is that like many women before her, Pao was tasked with finding solutions to difficult problems only for the men around her to avoid being blamed for them. While it stood to reason Pao would be targeted by the adolescents on the site, she probably would’ve appreciated a warning about the ones in the board room.”

Internet harassment and online threats targeting women: Research review | Journalist’s Resource: “As the totality and intensity of the harassment is being better understood, scholars have even begun to see this phenomenon as a profound civil rights issue for women and other groups such as racial minorities. Persistent threats can not only diminish well-being and cause psychological trauma but can undercut career prospects and the ability to function effectively in the marketplace and participate in democracy.”

The Mad Max Comics’ Half-Assed Female Characters | Vulture: “Lazy writers, when doing stories that feature women, are drawn magnetically to woman-denigrating plotlines because those are the ones so baked into the culture that they become easy. The Furiosa writers probably didn’t make the title character a brooding sexual-assault survivor because they wanted to take her down a peg; they did it because they couldn’t be bothered to do something more interesting. That is, of course, an extra disappointment because it runs so counter to the spirit of the movie. And it’s especially frustrating because it’s not a matter of bad storytelling, but a matter of a culture that condones and incentivizes bad stories. “

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